Big Jaws

It was the day of the Romeria, the annual pilgrimage of the festival of San Isidro, the patron saint of farmers, which begins in our local market town of La Carlota and ends some five kilometres away on the Monte: the plantation of holm oaks a short way beyond Las Pinedas, which has been a site of pilgrimage and picnics since anyone can remember. Even the addition of concrete barbecue sites recently erected by the local council the Monte still faintly retains the atmosphere of some primitive sacred grove. San Isidro himself travels to the Monte on a farm-cart towed by a tractor, hand upraised in benediction, preceded by the flashing lights of a police car and a bare half-dozen decorated floats populated by grinning children, followed by a long procession of local worthies in slow-moving cars, many towing trailers laden with chairs, tables and paella pans for the all-day picnic to come. As for San Isidro himself, he will spend the day on his cart, parked immediately outside the beer tent, looking a little more woozy from the fumes as the day goes on.
We had seen the procession snaking its way down the shallow valley which separates Las Pinedas from its upstart neighbour La Chica Carlota a kilometre away and the site of much recent new building, mostly on its Southern slopes and mercifully invisible to us - new Spanish domestic building is, alas, usually best left unseen. In course of time the procession arrived in Las Pinedas to make its leisurely way along the street re-named after the murdered poet Frederico Garcia Lorca when democracy returned to Spain after Franco's death. Hastening to see the procession pass in Calle Lorca, I left my own front door open in the paralle street re-named another great poet of Republican Spain, Antonio Machado (he sought refuge in France during the Civil War, but died - one suspects of a broken heart - soon after the war ended). As the police car with its flashing blue lights cleared the streets of possible anti-clerical demonstrators and other noxious vagabonds, I noticed a door open on the far side of the street to let out a dog. It was quite a small, sturdy-looking dog with disproportionately heavy jaws, as though a Yorkshire terrier and been mated with a Husky. It pushed purposefully between the legs of the small crowd gathered to watch the procession and disappeared behind us in the direction of Calle Antonio Machado.
The procession duly trundled by, and as the last slowly-moving cars were nursing their over-heated engines along Calle Lorca and out to the Monte, the dog in question re-appeared, trotting firmly along with the air of one who has successfully accomplished some important private mission. It poked its head between our legs, spotted a gap in the traffic, trotted across the road and disappeared into its owner's house.
A couple of days later, going into the still-room off our kitchen for a bottle of wine, I found to my amazement that the cardboard case in which the wine came had been torn open with great force by some unknown third party and then largely demolished, the ripped panels visibly bearing the tooth-marks of a large mouth used with considerable violence. For a moment it seemed as though the age of the super-rat had finally arrived in Las Pinedas. Yet the mouth which had done this work of destruction was self-evidently far from rat-like: more rounded (rather than coming to a point under a ratty nose) and furnished with the massive molars needed to dispatch a regular diet of butcher's meat. Surveying the damage - which thankfully was only to the cardboard, our intruder had left the bottles inside unharmed - my wife Fay and I were completely non-plussed as to what or who might have caused it.
It was some days later before I finally remembered the little brown dog with the massive jaws and the front door which I had casually left open on the morning of the 'Romeria de San Isidro'.
NT/May 2008.